Social media support

Departments, researchers and professional service staff can access support from Communications, Brand and Marketing to discuss social media accounts, develop a social media strategy and receive training.

We also recommend getting in touch with your relevant marketing contact for support for using social media for student recruitment:

• Arts and Humanities: Nicole Bissett
  • East 15 Acting School: Sanjana Suresh Kumar
  • Edge Hotel School: Fari Manangazira
• Science and Health: Simon Greenwood
  • School of Health and Social Care: TBC
• Social Sciences: Amy Silburn-Slater
  •  Essex Business School: Alexandra Stephens

What Communications can do for you

The Social Stakeholders Network. This group aims to bring together those in the academic and professional services sections who have a responsibility for social media accounts or manage those who do. Within this group you can access:

• Training, both for teams and individuals on topics such as (but not limited to) Canva design, social media strategy, understanding social media, promoting research on social media.
• Receiving university-wide social media assets.
• Help with software and social media tools.
• Help with templates and guidance to create on-brand social media assets.
• A forum to chat to other social media authors across the university, request support and share tips.  

Communications can also offer support on:

• The creation of new social media accounts.
• Social media strategy planning.
• Filming and images for social media.
• Managing (and closing) redundant accounts.

What Marketing can do for you

• Setting up a Facebook or Twitter account if you don’t already have one
• Creating a social media campaign to aid recruitment - this could be to promote a particular event or course, as well as to develop your online persona. Marketing can help to devise a calendar of posts, and help with content planning
• Advising on online branding and tone-of-voice
• Helping set-up a blog
• Organising a takeover of the University’s Instagram or Snapchat account for a specific time-period
• Developing your current social media accounts with fresh content ideas and advise on engaging with your audience (for recruitment purposes)
• Building a content calendar

Adopting a content strategy

One of the most common underestimations of social media management is how long it can take to think of, write and find images/video for strong social media posts. It can often feel daunting and difficult to think of something different and interesting to post, to solve this we recommend adopting a content strategy.

A content strategy will help you remember the bigger picture of what you are trying to achieve and take you through a process of matching different types of content to this and to a content calendar. We recommend breaking down content into ‘internal’ (University sourced content) and ‘external’ (student or third party sourced content).

It is also useful to create a content calendar to match content to appropriate dates and help spread out and schedule in posts for later.

When planning content, always think about:

• Who are our audiences?
• What do we want to share with them?
• Why would this content be valuable to our audiences?
• Where will they expect to find this content?
• What form of content would most suit our audience?